Of conversations with many other leading men of that period at Washington I remember that, at the house of my friend Dr. Hill, afterward a.s.sistant secretary of state, mention being made of the Blaine campaign, an eminent justice of the Supreme Court said that Mr. Blaine always insisted to the end of his life that he had lost the Presidency on account of the Rev. Dr. Burchard"s famous alliteration, "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion," and that the whole was really a Democratic trick. Neither the judge nor any other person present believed that Mr. Blaine"s opinion in this matter was well founded.
An important part of my business during this visit was to confer with the proper persons at Washington, including the German amba.s.sador, Baron von Thielmann, regarding sundry troublesome questions between the United States and Germany. The addition to the American tariff of a duty against the sugar imports from every other country equivalent to the sugar bounty allowed manufactures in that country had led to special difficulties. It had been claimed by Germany that this additional duty was contrary to the most-favored-nation clause in our treaties; and, unfortunately, the decisions on our side had been conflicting, Mr. Gresham, Secretary of State under Mr. Cleveland, having allowed that the German contention was right, and his successor, Mr. Olney, having presented an elaborate argument to show that it was wrong. On this point, conversations, not only with the Secretary of State and the German amba.s.sador, but with leading members of the committees of Congress having the tariff in charge, and especially with Mr. Allison and Mr. Aldrich of the Senate and Governor Dingley of the House, showed me that the case was complicated, the various interests somewhat excited against each other, and that my work in dealing with them was to be trying.
There were also several other questions no less difficult, those relating to the exportation of American products to Germany and the troubles already brewing in Samoa being especially prominent; so that it was with anything but an easy feeling that, on the 29th of May, I sailed from New York.
On the 12th of June I presented the President"s letter of credence to the Emperor William II. The more important of my new relations to the sovereign had given me no misgivings; for during my stay in Berlin as minister, eighteen years before, I had found him very courteous, he being then the heir apparent; but with the ceremonial part it was otherwise, and to that I looked forward almost with dismay.
For, since my stay in Berlin, the legation had been raised to an emba.s.sy. It had been justly thought by various patriotic members of Congress that it was incompatible, either with the dignity or the interests of so great a nation as ours, to be represented simply by a minister plenipotentiary, who, when calling at the Foreign Office to transact business, might be obliged to wait for hours, and even until the next day, while representatives from much less important countries who ranked as amba.s.sadors went in at once. The change was good, but in making it Congress took no thought of some things which ought to have been provided for. Of these I shall speak later; but as regards the presentation, the trying feature to me was that there was a great difference between this and any ceremonial which I had previously experienced, whether as commissioner at Santo Domingo and Paris, or as minister at Berlin and St. Petersburg. At the presentation of a minister plenipotentiary he goes in his own carriage to the palace at the time appointed; is ushered into the presence of the sovereign; delivers to him, with some simple speech, the autograph letter from the President; and then, after a kindly answer, all is finished. But an amba.s.sador does not escape so easily. Under a fiction of international law he is regarded as the direct representative of the sovereign power of his country, and is treated in some sense as such. Therefore it was that, at the time appointed, a high personage of the court, in full uniform, appeared at my hotel accompanied by various other functionaries, with three court carriages, attendants, and outriders, deputed to conduct me to the palace. Having been escorted to the first of the carriages,--myself, in plain citizen"s dress, on the back seat; my escort, in gorgeous uniform, facing me; and my secretaries and attaches in the other carriages,--we took up our march in solemn procession--carriages, outriders, and all--through the Wilhelmstra.s.se and Unter den Linden. On either side was a gaping crowd; at the various corps de garde bodies of troops came out and presented arms; and on our arrival at the palace there was a presentation of arms and beating of drums which, for the moment, somewhat abashed me. It was an ordeal more picturesque than agreeable.
The reception by the Emperor was simple, courteous, and kindly.
Neither of us made any set speech, but we discussed various questions, making reference to our former meeting and the changes which had occurred since. Among these changes I referred to the great improvement in Berlin, whereupon he said that he could not think the enormous growth of modern cities an advantage. My answer was that my reference was to the happy change in the architecture of Berlin rather than to its growth in population; that, during my first stay in the city, over forty years before, nearly all the main buildings were of brick and stucco, whereas there had now been a remarkable change from stucco to stone and to a much n.o.bler style of architecture. We also discussed the standing of Germans in America and their relations to the United States. On my remarking that it was just eighteen years and one day since the first Emperor William had received me as minister in that same palace, he spoke of various things in the history of the intervening years; and then ensued an episode such as I had hardly expected. For just before leaving New York my old friend Frederick William Holls, after a dinner at his house on the Hudson, had given his guests examples of the music written by Frederick the Great, and one piece had especially interested us.
It was a duet in which Mr. Holls played one part upon the organ, and his wife another upon the piano; and all of us were greatly impressed by the dignity and beauty of the whole. It had been brought to light and published by the present Emperor, and after the performance some one of the party remarked, in a jocose way, "You should express our thanks to his Majesty, when you meet him, for the pleasure which this music has given us." I thought nothing more of the subject until, just at the close of the conversation above referred to, it came into my mind; and on my mentioning it the Emperor showed at once a special interest, discussing the music from various points of view; and on my telling him that we were all surprised that it was not amateurish, but really profound in its harmonies and beautiful in its melodies, he dwelt upon the musical debt of Frederick the Great to Bach and the special influence of Bach upon him. This conversation recurred to me later, when the Emperor, in erecting the statue to Frederick the Great on the Avenue of Victory, placed on one side of it the bust of Marshal Schwerin, and on the other that of Johann Sebastian Bach, thus honoring the two men whom he considered most important during Frederick"s reign.
After presenting my emba.s.sy secretaries and attaches, military and naval, I was conducted with them into the presence of the Empress, who won all our hearts by her kindly, unaffected greeting. On my recalling her entrance into Berlin as a bride, in her great gla.s.s coach, seventeen years before, on one of the coldest days I ever knew, she gave amusing details of her stately progress down the Linden on that occasion; and in response to my congratulations upon her six fine boys and her really charming little daughter, it was pleasant to see how
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,"
her eyes lighting up with pride and joy, and her conversation gladly turning to the children.
It may be added here that the present Empress seems to have broken the unfortunate spell which for about half a century hung over the queens and empresses of the house of Hohenzollern. I remember well that, among the Germans whom I knew in my Berlin-University days, all the sins of the period, political and religious, seemed to be traced to the influence of Queen Elizabeth, the consort of the reigning King Frederick William IV; and that, during my first official stay in the same capital as minister, a similar feeling was shown toward the Empress Augusta, in spite of her most kindly qualities and her devotion to every sort of charitable work; and that the crown princess, afterward the Empress Frederick, in spite of all her endowments of head and heart, was apparently more unpopular than either of her two predecessors. But the present Empress seems to have changed all this, and, doubtless, mainly by her devotion to her husband and her children, which apparently excludes from her mind all care for the great problems of the universe outside her family. So strong is this feeling of kindness toward her that it was comical to see, at one period during my stay, when she had been brought perilously near a most unpopular course of action, that everybody turned at once upon her agent in the matter, saying nothing about her, but belaboring him unmercifully, though he was one of the most attractive of men.
These presentations being finished, our return to the Kaiserhof Hotel was made with the same ceremony as that with which we had come to the palace, and happy was I when all was over.
Of the other official visits at this time, foremost in importance was that to the chancellor of the empire, Prince Hohenlohe.
Although he was then nearly eighty years old and bent with age, his mind in discussing public matters was entirely clear. Various later conversations with him also come back to me--one, especially, at a dinner he gave at the chancellor"s palace to President Harrison. On my recalling the fact that we were in the room where I had first dined with Bismarck, Prince Hohenlohe gave a series of reminiscences of his great predecessor, some of them throwing a strong light upon his ideas and methods. On one occasion, at my own table, he spoke very thoughtfully on German characteristics, and one of his remarks surprised me: it was that the besetting sin of the Germans is envy (Neid); in which remark one may see a curious tribute to the tenacity of the race, since Tacitus justified a similar opinion. He seemed rather melancholy; but he had a way of saying pungent things very effectively, and one of these attributed to him became widely known. He was publicly advocating a hotly contested ca.n.a.l bill, when an opponent said, "You will find a solid rock in the way of this measure"; to which the chancellor rejoined, "We will then do with the rock as Moses did: we will smite it and get water for our ca.n.a.l."
As to the next visit of importance, I was especially glad to find at the Foreign Office the newly appointed minister, Baron (now Count) von Bulow. During the first part of my former stay, as minister, I had done business at the Foreign Office with his father, and found him in every respect a most congenial representative of the German Government. It now appeared that father and son were amazingly like each other, not only in personal manner, but in their mode of dealing with public affairs. With the mult.i.tude of trying questions which pressed upon me as amba.s.sador during nearly six years, it hardly seems possible that I should be still alive were it not for the genial, hearty intercourse, at the Foreign Office and elsewhere, with Count von Bulow. Sundry German papers, indeed, attacked him as yielding to much to me, and sundry American papers attacked me for yielding too much to him; but both of us exerted ourselves to do the best possible, each for his own country, and at the same time to preserve peace and increase good feeling.
Interesting was it to me, from my first to my last days in Berlin, to watch him in the discharge of his great duties, especially in his dealings with hostile forces in Parliament. No contrast could be more marked than that between his manner and that of his great predecessor, the iron chancellor. To begin with, no personalities could be more unlike. In the place of an old man, big, rumbling, heavy, fiery, minatory, objurgatory, there now stood a young man, quiet, self-possessed, easy in speech, friendly in manner, "sweet reasonableness" apparently his main characteristic, bubbling at times with humor, quick to turn a laugh on a hostile bungler, but never cruel; prompt in returning a serious thrust, but never venomous. Many of his speeches were masterpieces in their way of handling opponents. An attack which Bismarck would have met with a bludgeon, Bulow parried with weapons infinitely lighter, but in some cases really more effective. A very good example was on an occasion when the old charge of "Byzantinism" was flung at the present regime, to which he replied, not by a historical excursus or political disquisition, but by humorously deprecating a comparison of the good, kindly, steady-going, hard-working old privy councilors and other state officials of Berlin with fanatics, conspirators, and a.s.sa.s.sins who played leading parts at Constantinople during the decline of the Eastern Empire. In the most stormy discussions I never saw him other than serene; under real provocation he remained kindly; more than one bitter opponent he disarmed with a retort; but there were no poisoned wounds. The German Parliament, left to itself, can hardly be a peaceful body. The lines of cleavage between parties are many, and some of them are old chasms of racial dislike and abysses of religious and social hate; but the appearance of the young chancellor at his desk seemed, even on the darkest days, to bring sunshine.
Occasionally, during my walks in the Thiergarten, I met him on his way to Parliament; and, no matter how pressing public business might be, he found time to extend his walk and prolong our discussions. On one of these walks I alluded to a hot debate of the day before and to his suavity under provocation, when he answered: "Old ----, many years ago, gave me two counsels, and I have always tried to mind them. These were: "Never worry; never lose your temper.""
A pet phrase among his critics is that he is a diplomatist and not a statesman. Like so many ant.i.theses, this is misleading. It may be just to say that his methods are, in general, those of a diplomatist rather than of a statesman; but certain it is that in various debates of my time he showed high statesmanlike qualities, and notably at the beginning of the war with China and in sundry later contests with the agrarians and socialists. Even his much criticized remark during the imbroglio between Turkey and Greece, picturing Germany as laying down her flute and retiring from the "European Concert," which to many seemed mere persiflage, was the humorous presentation of a policy dictated by statesmanship. Nor were all his addresses merely light and humorous; at times, when some deep sentiment had been stirred, he was eloquent, rising to the height of great arguments and taking broad views.
No one claims that he is a Richelieu, a William Pitt, or a Cavour; but the work of such men is not what the German Empire just now requires. The man needed at present is the one who can keep things GOING, who can minimize differences, resist extremists, turn aside marplots, soothe doctrinaires, and thus give the good germs in the empire a chance to grow. For this work it would be hard to imagine a better man than the present chancellor. His selection and retention by the Emperor prove that the present monarch has inherited two of the best qualities of his ill.u.s.trious grandfather: skill in recognizing the right man and firmness in standing by him.
The next thing which an amba.s.sador is expected to do, after visiting the great representatives of the empire, is to become acquainted with the official world in general.
But he must make acquaintance with these under his own roof. On his arrival he is expected to visit the Emperor and the princes of his family, the imperial chancellor, and the minister of foreign affairs, but all others are expected to visit him; hence the most pressing duty on my arrival was to secure a house, and, during three months following, all the time that I could possibly spare, and much that I ought not to have spared, was given to excursions into all parts of the city to find it. No house, no amba.s.sador. A minister plenipotentiary can live during his first year in a hotel or in a very modest apartment; an amba.s.sador cannot. He must have a s.p.a.cious house fully furnished before he can really begin his duties; for, as above stated, one of the first of these duties is to make the acquaintance of the official world,--the ministers of the crown, the diplomatic corps, the members of the Imperial Parliament, the members of the Prussian legislature, the foremost men in the army and navy, and the leaders in public life generally,--and to this end he must give three very large receptions, at which all those personages visit him. This is a matter of which the court itself takes charge, so far as inviting and presenting the guests is concerned, high court officials being sent to stand by the side of the amba.s.sador and amba.s.sadress and make the introductions to them; but, as preliminary to all this, the first thing is to secure a residence fit for such receptions and for entertainments in connection with them.
Under the rules of European nations generally, these receptions must be held at the amba.s.sador"s permanent residence; but, unfortunately, such a thing as a large furnished apartment suitable for a foreign representative is rarely to be found in Berlin. In London and Paris such apartments are frequently offered, but in Berlin hardly ever. Every other nation which sends an amba.s.sador to Berlin--and the same is true as regards the other large capitals of Europe--owns a suitable house, or at least holds a long lease of a commodious apartment; but, although President Cleveland especially recommended provision for such residence in one of his messages, nothing has yet been done by the American Congress, and the consequence is that every amba.s.sador has to lose a great amount of valuable time, effort, and money in securing proper quarters, while his country loses much of its proper prestige and dignity by constant changes in the location of its emba.s.sy, and by the fact that the American representative is not infrequently obliged to take up his residence in unfit apartments and in an unsuitable part of the town.
After looking at dozens of houses, the choice was narrowed down to two; but, as one was nearly three miles from the center of the city, selection was made of the large apartment which I occupied during nearly four years, and which was bought from under my feet by one of the smallest governments in Europe as the residence for its minister. Immediately after my lease was signed there began a new series of troubles. Everything must be ready for the three receptions by the eighth day of January; and, being at the mercy of my landlord, I was at a great disadvantage. Though paying large rent for the apartment, I was obliged, at my own expense, to put it thoroughly in order, introducing electric light, perfecting heating apparatus, getting walls and floors in order, and doing a world of work which, under other circ.u.mstances, would have been done by the proprietor himself. As to furnishing, a peculiar difficulty arose. Berlin furnishers, as a rule, have only samples in stock, and a long time is required for completing sets. My former experience, when, as minister, I had been obliged to go through a similar ordeal, had shown me that the Berlin makers could never be relied upon to get the apartment furnished in time; and therefore it was that, having secured what was possible in Berlin, I was obliged to make large purchases at Dresden, London, and Paris, and to have the furniture from the last-named city hurried on to Berlin in special wadded cars, with attendants to put it in place. It was a labor and care to which no representative of the United States or of any other power ought to be subjected. The vexations and difficulties seemed unending; but at last carpenters, paper-hangers, electric-light men, furniture men, carpet-layers, upholsterers, and the like were driven from the house just five minutes before the chancellor of the empire arrived to open the first of these three official receptions. Happily they all went off well, and thereby began my acquaintance with the leaders in various departments of official life.
On my settling down to the business of the emba.s.sy, it appeared that the changes in public sentiment since my former stay as minister, eighteen years before, were great indeed. At that time German feeling was decidedly friendly to the United States. The Germans had sided with us in our Civil War, and we had come out victorious; we had sided with them in their war of 1870-1871, and they had come out victorious. But all this was now changed.
German feeling toward us had become generally adverse and, in some parts of the empire, bitterly hostile. The main cause of this was doubtless our protective policy. Our McKinley tariff, which was considered almost ruinous to German manufactures, had been succeeded by the Dingley tariff, which went still further; and as Germany, in the last forty years, had developed an amazing growth of manufactures, much bitterness resulted.
Besides this, our country was enabled, by its vast extent of arable land, as well as by its cheap conveyance and skilful handling of freights, to sweep into the German markets agricultural products of various sorts, especially meats, and to undersell the native German producers. This naturally vexed the landed proprietors, so that we finally had against us two of the great influential cla.s.ses in the empire: the manufacturers and the landowners.
But this was not all. These real difficulties were greatly increased by fict.i.tious causes of ill feeling. Sensational articles, letters, telegrams, caricatures, and the like, sent from America to Germany and from Germany to America, had become more and more exasperating, until, at the time of my arrival, there were in all Germany but two newspapers of real importance friendly to the United States. These two journals courageously stood up for fairness and justice, but all the others were more or less hostile, and some bitterly so. The one which, on account of its zeal in securing news, I read every morning was of the worst. During the Spanish War it was especially virulent, being full of statements and arguments to show that corruption was the main characteristic of our government, cowardice of our army and navy, and hypocrisy of our people. Very edifying were its quasi-philosophical articles; and one of these, showing the superiority of the Spanish women to their American sisters, especially as regards education, was a work of genius. The love of Spanish women for bull-fights was neatly glossed over, and various absurd charges against American women were put in the balance against it. A few sensational presses on our side were perhaps worse. Various newspapers in America repaid Teutonic hostility by copious insults directed at everything German, and this aroused the Germans yet more. One journal, very influential among the aristocratic and religious public of Northern Germany, regularly published letters of considerable literary merit from its American correspondent, in which every scandal which could be raked out of the gutters of the cities, every crime in the remotest villages, and all follies of individuals everywhere, were kneaded together into statements showing that our country was the lowest in the scale of human civilization. The tu-quoque argument might have been used by an American with much effect; for just about this period there were dragging along, in the Berlin and other city journals, accounts of German trials for fraud and worse, surpa.s.sing, in some respects, anything within my memory of American tribunals. The quant.i.ty of fig-leaves required in some of these trials was enormous; and, despite all precautions, some details which escaped into the press might well bring a blush to the most hardened American offender. It was both vexatious and comical to see the smug, Pharisaical way in which many journals ignored all these things, and held up their hands in horror at American shortcomings. Some trials, too, which at various times revealed the brutality of sundry military officers toward soldiers, were heartrending; and especially one or two duels, which occurred during my stay, presented features calculated to shock the toughest American rough-rider. But all this seemed not for a moment to withdraw the attention of our Teutonic censors from American folly and wickedness. One of the main charges constantly made was that in America there was a "Deutschen Hetze." Very many German papers had really persuaded themselves, and apparently had convinced a large part of the German people, that throughout our country there existed a hate, deep and acrid, of everything German and especially of German-Americans. The ingenuity of some German papers in supporting this thesis was wonderful. On one occasion a petty squabble in a Roman Catholic theological school in the United States between the more liberal element and a reactionary German priest, in which the latter came to grief, was displayed as an evidence that the American people were determined to drive out all German professors and to abjure German science. The doings of every scapegrace in an American university, of every silly woman in Chicago, of every blackguard in New York, of every sn.o.b at Newport, of every desperado in the Rocky Mountains, of every club loafer anywhere, were served up as typical examples of American life. The munic.i.p.al governments of our country, and especially that of New York, were an exhaustless quarry from which specimens of every kind of scoundrelism were drawn and used in building up an ideal structure of American life; corruption, lawlessness, and barbarism being its most salient features.
Nor was this confined to the more ignorant. Men who stood high in the universities, men of the greatest amiability, who in former days had been the warmest friends of America, had now become our bitter opponents, and some of their expressions seemed to point to eventual war.
Yet I doubt whether we have any right to complain of such attacks and misrepresentations. As a matter of fact, no nation washes so much of its dirty linen in the face of the whole world as does our own; and, what is worse, there is washed in our country, with much noise and perversity, a great deal of linen which is not dirty. Many demagogues and some "reformers" are always doing this. There is in America a certain cla.s.s of excellent people who see nothing but the sc.u.m on the surface of the pot; nothing but the worst things thrown to the surface in the ebullition of American life. Or they may be compared to people who, with a Persian carpet before them, persist in looking at its seamy side, and finding nothing but odds and ends, imperfect joints, unsatisfactory combinations of color; the real pattern entirely escaping them. The shrill utterances of such men rise above the low hum of steady good work, and are taken in Germany as exact statements of the main facts in our national life.
Let me repeat here one example which I have given more than once elsewhere. Several years since, an effort was made to impeach the President of the United States. The current was strong, and most party leaders thought it best to go with it. Three senators of the United States st.u.r.dily refused, their leader being William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, who, believing the impeachment an attempt to introduce Spanish-American politics into our country, resolutely opposed it. The State convention of his party called upon him to vote for it, the national convention of the party took the same ground, his relatives and friends besought him to yield, but he stood firmly against the measure, and finally, by his example and his vote, defeated it. It was an example of Spartan fort.i.tude, of Roman heroism, worthy to be chronicled by Plutarch. How was it chronicled? I happened to be traveling in Germany at the time, and naturally watched closely for the result of the impeachment proceedings. One morning I took up a German paper containing the news and read, "The impeachment has been defeated; three senators were bribed," and at the head of the list of bribed senators was the name of Fessenden! The time will come when his statue will commemorate his great example; let us hope that the time will also come when party spirit will not be allowed to disgrace our country by sending out to the world such monstrous calumnies.
As to attacks upon the United States, it is only fair to say that German publicists and newspaper writers were under much provocation. Some of the American correspondents then in Germany showed wonderful skill in malignant invention. My predecessors in the emba.s.sy had suffered much from this cause. One of them, whom I had known from his young manhood as a gentleman of refined tastes and quiet habits, utterly incapable of rudeness of any sort, was accused, in a sensational letter published in various American journals, of having become so noisy and boisterous at court that the Emperor was obliged to rebuke him. Various hints of a foul and scandalous character were sent over and published.
I escaped more easily, but there were two or three examples which were both vexatious and amusing.
Shortly after my arrival at my post, letters and newspaper articles began coming deploring the conduct of the Germans toward me, expressing deep sympathy with me, exhorting me to "stand firm," declaring that the American people were behind me, etc., etc., all of which puzzled me greatly until I found that some correspondent had sent over a telegram to the effect that the feeling against America had become so bitter that the Emperor himself had been obliged to intervene and command the officials of his empire to present themselves at my official reception; and with this statement was coupled a declaration that I had made the most earnest remonstrance to the Imperial Government against such treatment. The simple fact was that the notice was in the stereotyped form always used when an amba.s.sador arrives. On every such occasion the proper authorities notify all the persons concerned, giving the time of his receptions, and this was simply what was done in my case. On another occasion, telegrams were sent over to American papers stating that the first secretary of the emba.s.sy and myself, on visiting Parliament to hear an important debate, had been grossly insulted by various members.
The fact was that we had been received by everybody with the utmost kindness; that various members had saluted us in the most friendly manner from the floor or had come into the diplomatic gallery to welcome us; and that there was not the slightest shadow of reason for the statement. As an example of the genius shown in some of these telegrams, another may be mentioned. A very charming American lady, niece of a member of Mr. McKinley"s cabinet, having arrived on the Norwegian coast, her children were taken on board the yacht of the Emperor, who was then cruising in those regions; and later, on their arrival at Berlin, they with their father and mother were asked by him to the palace to meet his own wife and children. A few days afterward a telegram was published in America to the effect that the Emperor, in speaking to Mrs. White and myself regarding the children, had said that he was especially surprised, because he had always understood that American children were badly brought up and had very bad manners.
The simple fact was that, while he spoke of the children with praise, the rest of the story was merely a sensational invention.
One of the marvels of American life is the toleration by decent fathers and mothers of sensational newspapers in their households. Of all the demoralizing influences upon our people, and especially upon our young people, they are the most steadily and pervasively degrading. Horace Greeley once published a tractate ent.i.tled, "New Themes for the Clergy," and I would suggest the evil influence of sensation newsmongering as a most fruitful theme for the exhortations of all American clergymen to their flocks, whether Catholic, Jewish, or Protestant. May we not hope, also, that Mr. Pulitzer"s new College of Journalism will give careful attention to this subject?
As to public questions then demanding attention, the first which I now recall was a bit of international comedy, serving as a prelude to more important matters, and worth mentioning here only as showing a misconception very absurd, yet not without dangers.
One morning, as I had just sat down to my office work, there was ushered in, with due ceremony, a young gentleman of light color, Parisian to the tips of his fingers,--in accent, manner, and garb,--who was announced as the charge d"affaires of Haiti. He was evidently under deep concern, and was soon in the midst of a somewhat impa.s.sioned statement of his business.
It appeared that his government, like so many which had preceded it, after a joyous career of proclamations, revolutions, throat-cutting, confiscation, paper money, and loans, public and private, had at last met a check, and that in this instance the check had come in the shape of a German frigate which had dropped into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, run out its guns, and demanded redress of injuries and payment of debts to Germany and German subjects; and the charge, after dwelling upon the enormity of such a demand, pointed out the duty of the United States to oblige Germany to desist,--in short, to a.s.sert the Monroe Doctrine as he understood it.
The young diplomatist"s statement interested me much; it brought back vividly to my mind the days when, as a commissioner from the United States, I landed at Port-au-Prince, observed the wreck and ruin caused by a recent revolution, experienced the beauties of a paper-money system carried out so logically that a market-basket full of currency was needed to buy a market-basket full of vegetables, visited the tombs of the presidents from which the bodies of their occupants had been torn and scattered, saw the ring to which President Salnave had recently been tied when the supporters of his successor had murdered him, and mused over the ruins of the presidential mansion, which had been torn in pieces by bombs from a patriotic vessel. My heart naturally warmed toward the representative of so much glory, and it seemed sad to quench his oratorical fire and fervor with a cold statement of fact. But my duty was plain: I a.s.sured him that neither the President whose name the famous "Doctrine" bears, nor the Secretary of State who devised it, nor the American people behind them, had any idea of protecting our sister republics in such conduct as that of which the Germans complained; and I concluded by fervently exhorting him to advise his government and people simply to--pay their debts.
It gave me pleasure to learn, somewhat later, that this very prosaic solution of the difficulty had been adopted.
I make haste to add that nothing which may be said here or elsewhere in these recollections regarding sundry equatorial governments has any reference to our sister republics of South America really worthy of the name. No countries were in my time more admirably represented at Berlin than the Argentine Republic, Chile, and Brazil. The first-named sent as its minister the most eminent living authority on international law; the second, a gentleman deeply respected for character and ability, whose household was one of the most beautiful and attractive I have ever known; and the third, a statesman and scholar worthy of the best traditions of his country.
As to more complicated international matters with which my emba.s.sy had to deal, the first to a.s.sume a virulent form was that of the Samoan Islands.
During the previous twenty-five years the United States, Germany, and Great Britain had seemed to develop equal claims in Samoa.
There had been clashes from time to time, in which good sense had generally prevailed; but in one case a cyclone which destroyed the German and American vessels of war in the main port of the islands seemed providential in preventing a worse form of trouble.
But now the chronic difficulties became acute. In the consuls of the three powers what Bismarck used to call the furor consularis was developed to the highest degree. Yet this was not the worst.
Under the Berlin agreement, made some years before, there was a German president of the munic.i.p.ality of Apia with ill-defined powers, and an American chief justice with powers in some respects enormous, and each of these naturally magnified his office at the expense of the other. To complete the elements of discord, there were two great native parties, each supporting its candidate for kingship; and behind these, little spoken of, but really at the bottom of the main trouble, were missionaries,--English Wesleyans on one side, and French Roman Catholics on the other,--each desiring to save the souls of the natives, no matter at what sacrifice of their bodies.
This tea-pot soon began to boil violently. The old king having died, the question arose as to the succession. The power of appointing the successor having been in the most clear and definite terms bestowed by the treaty upon the chief justice, he named for the position Malietoa Tanu, a young chieftain who had been induced to call himself a Protestant; but on the other side was Mataafa, an old chief who years before had made much trouble, had been especially obnoxious to the Germans, and had been banished, but had been recently allowed to return on his taking oath that he would abstain from all political action, and would be true to his allegiance to the Malietoan kings. He had been induced to call himself a Catholic.
But hardly had he returned when, having apparently been absolved from his oath, he became the leader of a political party and insisted on his right to the kingship.
The result was a petty civil war which cost many lives. Nor was this all. A drunken Swiss having one day amused himself by breaking the windows of the American chief justice"s court and no effective punishment having been administered by the German president of Apia, the Yankee chief justice took the matter into his own hands, and this Little Pedlington business set in motion sensation-mongers throughout the world. They exerted themselves to persuade the universe that war might, and indeed ought to, result between the three great nations concerned. On the arrival of the American Admiral Kautz, he simply and naturally supported the decree which the chief justice had made, in strict accordance with the treaty of Berlin, and was finally obliged to fire upon the insurgents. Now came a newspaper carnival: screams of wrath from the sensation press of Germany and yells of defiance from the sensation press of the United States.
It was fortunate, indeed, that at this period the American Secretary of State was Mr. John Hay and the German minister of foreign affairs Count von Bulow. Both at Washington and Berlin the light of plain common sense was gradually let into this jungle of half truths and whole falsehoods; the appointment of an excellent special commission, who supplanted all the officials in the islands by new men, solved various preliminary problems, so that finally a treaty was made between the three nations concerned which swept away the old vicious system, part.i.tioned the islands between the United States and Germany, giving Great Britain indemnity elsewhere, and settled all the questions involved, as we may hope, forever.
Among my duties and pleasures during this period was attendance upon important debates in the Imperial Parliament. That body presents many features suggestive of thought. The arrangement under which the Senate, representing the various states of the empire, and the House, representing the people as a whole, sit face to face in joint deliberation, strikes an American as especially curious; but it seems to work well, and has one advantage in bringing the most eminent servants of the various states into direct personal relations with the rank and file from the country at large. The German Parliament has various good points. Some one has a.s.serted that the United States Senate is as much better than the British House of Lords as the British House of Commons is better than the American House of Representatives.
There is much to be said for this contention, and there are some points in which the German Parliament also struck me as an improvement upon our Lower House: they do less than we in committee, and more in the main a.s.semblage; German members are more attentive to the work in hand, and spread-eagleism and speeches to the galleries which are tolerated at Washington are not tolerated at Berlin. On the other hand, the members at Berlin, not being paid for their services, absent themselves in such numbers that the lack of a sufficient deliberating body has been found, at times, a serious evil.
As to men prominent in debate, allusion has already been made to the chancellor, and various ministers of the crown might be added, of whom I should give the foremost place to the minister of the interior, Count Posadowski. His discussions of all matters touching his department, and, indeed, of some well outside it, were masterly. Save, perhaps, our own Senator John Sherman, I have never heard so USEFUL a speaker on fundamental questions of public business. As to the representatives, there were many well worth listening to; but the two who attracted most attention were Richter, the head of the "Progressist," or, as we should call it, the radical fraction, and Bebel, the main representative of the Socialists. Richter I had heard more than once in my old days, and had been impressed by his extensive knowledge of imperial finance, his wit and humor, his skill in making his points, and his strength in enforcing them. He was among the few still remaining after my long absence, and it was clear to me that he had not deteriorated,--that he had, indeed, mellowed in a way which made him even more interesting than formerly. As to Bebel, though generally disappointing at first, he was quite sure, in every speech, to raise some point which put the conservatives on their mettle. His strongest characteristic seems to be his earnestness: the earnestness of a man who has himself known what the hardest struggle for existence is, and what it means to suffer for his opinions. His weakest point seems to be a tendency to exaggeration which provokes distrust; but, despite this, he has been a potent force as an irritant in drawing attention to the needs of the working-cla.s.ses, and so in promoting that steady uplifting of their condition and prospects which is one of the most striking achievements of modern Germany.
Among the many other members interesting on various accounts was one to whom both Germans and Americans might well listen with respect--Herr Theodor Barth, editor of "Die Nation," a representative of the best traditions of the old National Liberal party. He seemed to me one of the very few Germans who really understood the United States. He had visited America more than once, and had remained long enough to get in touch with various leaders of American thought, and to penetrate below the mere surface of public affairs. Devoted as he was to his own fatherland, he seemed to feel intuitively the importance to both countries of accentuating permanent points of agreement rather than transient points of difference; hence it was that in his paper he steadily did us justice, and in Parliament was sure to repel any unmerited a.s.sault upon our national character and policy. He was clear and forcible, with, at times, a most effectively caustic utterance against unreason.